


Prayers to the God of Earth

by deborah_judge



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fix-It, Post-Canon, Religious Conflict, Religious Themes & References, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-26
Updated: 2010-11-26
Packaged: 2017-10-13 09:27:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/135740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deborah_judge/pseuds/deborah_judge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kara is no longer human and Leoben is no longer a prophet, but they each still have a destiny, and Kara wants to give Leoben what he has given her. Set post-finale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. God's Justice

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: Through the finale, minor spoilers for The Plan and Caprica.
> 
> Warnings: General warning for disturbing themes, particularly related to religion and to religious violence and coercion. References to teenage marriage and pregnancy and to canon character death. Also, although there is no non-consensual sex, there are other possibly triggery non-consensual things, on the same level as canon.
> 
> Disclaimer: I own nothing. The Lords of Kobol and One True Cylon God are based on BSG canon and any resemblance to real-world religions, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

In the name of the One True God. In the name of the Earth on which we stand. In the name of the prophets who taught us and the mothers and fathers who gave us life. In the name of all that has gone before, and in the name of all that we and our people have done.

Heavenly Father, watch over me as I tell this tale. It is a tale of the deeds of my ancestors, and of the Prophet whose words brought us to this place.

*

They landed on Earth in springtime. The planet was lush and green. For Leoben, it was strange to be outside. This was the third planet on which he had walked. It felt greener than it should be, greener than he had imagined. The sky warmed but did not burn, and in the distance there were no fires.

Leoben had seen Kara's body on the fallen Earth. He had entered her dreams, he had led her into a maelstrom and told her not to fear death and she had taken the destiny he offered. There is a place between life and death from which any of God's children can return, and she led her people like a living angel. This is what he had told her. This is what he had seen. Her body lay twisted on Earth, where she had died, burning, in pain. He had done this to her, he had led her to this death. He was no longer a true prophet. Nothing that he had ever seen was true.

*

The first night Leoben slept on this new green Earth he felt Kara in his dreams. She knew how to enter his dreams, since he had done it to her, and she was now far stronger than he had ever been. She had dreamed his hands into shackles and wrapped a rope around him, tying him to a flat metal chair. None of his restraints yielded to his pull, and Kara bent over him like an angel.

"What are you?" he asked. He needed to know what he had done, what had happened once he had killed Kara Thrace.

The room shifted, and it was a dungeon on a ship. Of course, she was the one asking questions here. "What was the destiny you saw for me?" she asked. "What did you see?"

He had seen her kissing him, smiling and passionate, at peace and at home in a house that he had built. He had seen her pregnant with his child, radiant in the glow of fulfilled destiny. He had seen their children and their children's children, not Human and Cylon but something else, something Leoben didn't have words to imagine. He remembered when he had been so certain. _You’re going to hold me in your arms, you’re going to embrace me, you’re going to tell me that you love me._ "Lies," he said. "I saw lies."

She grabbed his shirt and hit him, her fist to his jaw. It felt good to have her hands on him. It reminded him of the happiest days of his life, before he had seen her body burned in the ruins of a destroyed world. "What are you?" he asked again. He was begging this time, but she had seen him beg before.

"What did you see?" she asked. She leaned forward. He angled his face towards her, almost close enough to reach. "I know this isn't all of it, not just bringing the fleet to this place. I didn't have to die for this."

"I saw." he began, _Kara's body twisted and burned._ "Lies," he finished. "That's all I ever saw. Just tell me what you are."

She looked at him as if she were looking through him, and Leoben wondered if Kara could simply reach into his mind and take the memory. He wouldn't be surprised. It was something he could have done, when he had believed himself a prophet, and she was stronger now than he had ever been. "You did something for me, once," Kara said. "You said I had a destiny. You helped me figure out my path when I was lost. So, I suppose I owe you."

"Then you'll tell me..." he began. She gestured with her head and his mouth sealed shut.

She laughed. It was good to see her smile. "Frak. Wish I could've done that when I was alive." She kept laughing, watching him splutter in silence, and then he started to laugh as well. He understood nothing, and she was even more beautiful than he had remembered.

"You'll find me," she said. "You'll need to look, but you'll find me." He will. He couldn't speak so he thought it, knowing she would hear. He would seek her until the ends of the Earth.

She led him, still shackled, down stairs to the place where he had kept her. There was blood on the floor, mostly his, and she stood in front of him with her hands placed flat on his chest. "It's different now," she said. "I'm making my own destiny."

The dream faded and the restraints melted away. In the last moments of sleep Leoben felt Kara's breath on his cheek, tickling him like the beginnings of a kiss.

*

The Twelve Colonies had needed to fall. It was God's will. This is what Leoben had told his sisters the Sixes and Eights as they, along with their brothers and sisters, prepared their final attack. They are the instrument of God. They will bring justice on God's worlds, the words that had fallen to the sin of idolatry, and when the destruction has passed a greater nation will rise to serve the One God.

One of his sisters, a Six, was not sure. This one had no name yet but would be given one by the world they would destroy. She was his favorite sister, the one whose faith was most strong, and when she was newly emerged from the shaping-bath he had braided her blond hair and told her of the man she would one day love, a man of broken faith and brilliant beauty, and of the promised child that she and her human beloved would have together. Leoben knew that she had found this man in recent days, knew it in her radiance and fear. She caught Leoben alone, when the other brothers and sisters were not watching. "How can I love Gaius," she asked, "if we are to destroy him?"

Leoben had seen the visions, and they were clear. His own Kara would die in a maelstrom, and would return. He had seen her die, and he had seen her alive. It was as the Hybrid has spoken: Love outlasts death. Apotheosis, the Hybrid said, is both the end and the beginning. Leoben knew this to be true, from his visions and from his faith. "The first principle of faith," Leoben explained, "is that this is not all that we are."

The one to be called Caprica nodded, glanced towards the planet that would name her. "I think they'll be grateful," she said. "Once they learn to believe."

 _She is the harbinger of death._ How had Leoben not understood?

*

Leoben told his sister Six about the dream, and about Kara, and explained that he would have to go. She understood. She remembered when he had come to her on New Caprica and told her, calmly and simply, that he had seen a vision and needed to build a house and a prison for Kara Thrace. "There's got to be another way," she had said, but there hadn't been, not to fulfill the vision in all its details: a darkened place, a house he had built, a child who was and wasn't theirs, an embrace, a kiss, certain words. It all seemed so very important. His sister had helped him build the house, and helped him bring Kara to it, and helped clear away his bodies one by one.

His sister had found her own truth now, and her own forgiveness, in the home she shared with Gaius on this new world, but there was none there for him. She understood, he would have to go, it would be a long journey. He might never come back. She nodded and forgave him. _Heavenly Father, Leoben prayed, Guide me on my path._

By the time he reached the desert it burned with the heat of summer. He touched the land, and saw thunder, lightning, storms. A true teacher would come from this place, and it was not a land for false prophets. This was sacred ground. It was not the place where Kara would be waiting.

He walked further and when he reached as far as he could walk he built a ship and sailed until he reached an island off the central coast of a northern continent. He pressed his ear to the ground and felt a city, the nerve-center of an empire, two towers reach to heaven and then fall, burnt, bodies twisted in metal wreckage. This too was sacred ground.

There was no justice on this new earth, none in this spring that falls for the righteous and the wicked. Leoben took a fistfull of grass in his hand. It was greener than he would have expected it to be, and Kara was not with him.

*

He dreamed of Kara almost every night. She was not in his mind, he would know if she were, these were just dreams. Sometimes she was killing him: water, knives, bedsheets, her hand down his throat. She was creative, there were always new ways. Sometimes she held him before killing him, and then he didn't so much mind the dying.

"What am I?" he heard Kara's voice shouting behind him, once, in a densely treed forest. He turned, and the forest was empty.

*

He walked inland from the coast, and on the third day he reached a village of perhaps fifty homes. A six-year-old child bounded out to greet him and he almost didn't recognize her until she wrapped her fingers around his hand.

"Kacey," Leoben remembered her full name. "Cassandra."

Julia was with them in a moment. "You're the Cylon who took my child," she said.

 _It was God's plan,_ he thought to say. _It was necessary for the work that brought us here._ For Kara, so that she would become what she always was, a bright light of God to lead her people to their end and their home. Then he looked at Julia's village, the thatched single-room houses and the meager, half-frozen fields, and he could not think of any reason why Julia or her daughter should care. "Next year there will be a drought," he said. "I've seen it. You should store extra grain. I'll help you." Julia nodded. Leoben touched the ground. "Kacey will live long, and see much, and she will know the face of God in this lifetime. She will wed a great leader, who will found a city that will last for ten thousand years." And in the hundredth century it will fall, he did not say, and its inhabitants will be scattered, and most will die, hungry, their bodies covered by the encroaching ice. The few survivors will join another civilization, which will thrive, and too will fall. The cycles turn and twist and only love can shape them. Or can break them, like Kara's body burnt in her Viper. "I would like to stay," Leoben said. "If you will allow it."

"I don't want you here," Julia said. "I don't trust you."

"I'll stay outside the village until you do," Leoben said.

He built a house for himself of wooden logs a short walk outside the village. Chopping wood was easy because he was strong. Stones from the river could be shaped into knives, trees could be cut and bent and broken with his hands. Every day he cut wood and placed it just outside the village and watched as Julia collected it and brought it home to her family. When the leaves turned and fell they needed more wood, and he worked dawn until night. Finally, after the snow first fell, Julia came to his cabin to invite him to share a meal at her home.

"It wasn't my idea," she said. "Kacey wants to see you."

Kacey was quiet, and at dinner little was said, but while Julia was clearing the dishes Kacey grabbed Leoben's hand. "I remember," Kacey began. "When I was little. I don't remember much. I remember you took me to a place that was dry and clean and safe and warm, where a lady hugged me like I was her child, and when I hurt my head you bandaged me."

Julia was back and watching them. "A lot of children died on New Caprica. Kacey lived. Maybe you saved her."

 _That wasn't why I did it,_ Leoben thought, but he was willing to accept the welcome.

*

Near his cabin a stream flowed. Sleep the stream said, so he lay down beside it, placed his head on a protruding root, and slept. In his dream, Kara was beside him. The roots grew around his neck and legs so he couldn't move as she touched him, as she tore off his clothes until he was naked beneath her. Starlight was in her hair as she straddled him. When she collapsed on him he felt the heat in her body burn through the wooden restraints holding him. He reached for her, but her skin parted under his touch and he felt bone. The flesh melted from her face and body and she became ashes in his arms.

He woke, sweating. It was only a dream, this time. He thought.

*

Seven years passed. In the winter he cut firewood and in the spring he plowed the newly-cleared fields. He spoke little to anyone. He thought to continue wandering, but although the forest was too green he couldn't imagine where Kara could want him to find her other than here, with the daughter that was never hers.

Sometimes Kacey would come out to his cabin to watch him. She would stand at a distance, not speaking. He wondered what she saw, or why she sought him out, but he did not approach her. Finally, in her thirteenth year, Kacey planted herself down outside his cabin. "I want you to teach me about God," she said.

"I'm not a teacher," said Leoben, and kept walking.

"I know you know," said Kacey. "I remember." Of couse she would. Leoben stopped, turned around, and sat down next to Kacey. "I keep remembering more," she said. Her childhood memories would come back to her, and some of them would be memories of what he was, of what he had done.

"And what do you remember?"

She was silent, remembering. "You prayed. You died. You came back. Then you died again, and now you're here."

"That isn't because of God," Leoben said. "That's because I'm a Cylon. Do you know what a Cylon is?"

"I'm not stupid," she said. "Of course I know that." He waited. "My mother prays to the Lords of Kobol. But they're not real, are they?"

"How do you know?"

"I smashed one," she said, and smiled brightly. "My mother's statue of Aphrodite. Then I threw it in the fire. If even a stupid Cylon can come back after being killed then so should a god, and it didn't." The reasoning, Leoben had to admit, was flawless. He wished, not for the first time, that Kacey had truly been his child.

"There is only one God," Leoben said. "His name is unknowable and cannot be spoken. He manifests in the Cloud of Unknowing, and in the Love that Binds all things together."

"You can see that love," Kacey said, "can't you?"

"Yes," he said. It was a strange thing to admit. He was a false prophet, and all his visions had been lies, but still he had seen God's love. He had seen it in his sister Sharon and in his sister Six called Caprica, and once, bafflingly, in Kara's eyes. Perhaps he was seeing it now.

"Show me," Kacey said, and perhaps she had a right to know. _Her path will be difficult but rewarding, and she will know the face of God in her lifetime._ He led her to the stream that passed by his cabin and placed her hand in the water alongside his. The stream flowed through Kacey's fingers and her eyes fixed on a point in the distance. Love binds all things, Leoben thought, and could not understand the miracle that had allowed Kacey to forgive him.

Kara was waiting for him that night in the forest. He knew he was not asleep and it didn't feel like a dream, so she was alive and she was real and she was in his arms faster than he could feel himself move. He felt the strength of her muscles, the tension in her back and waited for the inevitable punch or stab, whatever it would be it didn't matter, just to be close to her. Instead, she held him close, clinging to him, her face on his shoulder, her breath urgent on his neck and he pressed his mouth to her neck and her hair was soft in his face. It lasted for a moment, long enough to feel her heart beat once, twice against his and to feel her breath that tasted nothing of ashes. Then his arms closed around empty space, and she was gone.

*

In the name of the One True God.

*

Next chapter: Kacey learns about God, Kara hunts, and Leoben gets an answer to his question.


	2. Hieros Gamos

My name is Cassandra and I have seen the future. Death will come and life will grow, summer will burn and spring will bring rain over parched ground. What has happened before will happen again, and love will bind together the lost.

This is a story of my people.

*

Four years later Kacey became pregnant with a boy from across the village. She resolutely refused to marry him, which no one understood until she announced her engagement to Kayla, daughter of two tanners from Gemenon. Kayla's parents would not agree to the match, since marriages between women were against their custom, but Kacey simply smiled blankly and babbled at them ceaselessly about God and Love (in a way of which Leoben very much approved) until they consented to the marriage out of sheer religious exhaustion. Kacey and Kayla were married on the town greens. Leoben watched from a distance, smiled quietly and kept out of Julia's way.

As intoxicated as Kacey was with her wife, she also had clearly made a good marriage. Kayla was already in her teens a skilled craftswoman, and shortly after their marriage (and shortly after their daughter Talia was born) she took charge of all building projects in the village. After successfully mediating a number of boundary quarrels that needed to be resolved before she could finish putting a house up she also developed a reputation for fair and clear judgment. By the time of the birth of Kacey and Kayla's second daughter Una (fathered by a young man from a nearby farmstead whose husband beamed even more proudly than any of Una's parents), Kayla had already been appointed town magistrate, hearing cases under an elm tree in the evenings once the work hours were done.

The village by then had grown into a small town. They called it Point Althea, after the Gemenon city from which Kayla's parents came. Leoben set up a blacksmith's shop and made metal beams for building. When Kacey's daughter Talia was eight she asked to apprentice with him. Talia had no interest in talk about God, although she said the prayers willingly enough, but she loved the feel of metal under her hands and the satisfaction of taking lumpy metal and beating it flat.

Kacey continued to visit Leoben and ask him for instruction. She learned to make ink from berries and parchment from the hides of hunted deer. She would write quietly and carefully as he spoke, one eye on her ever-increasing brood of children as they played nearby on the grass. He told her about God, about the beginning, about the paths of salvation that lead from one place to another but always circle around the place from which they came. He showed her how to enter the stream, and how to leave it. And he told her about history. The humans knew so little about the fall of their world.

*

In a dream, Kara took him to the planet Caprica, to the place where the first of his people was made. Her name was Zoe and her maker Daniel made her in the image of his dead daughter to soothe his loneliness and need. Leoben watched him break her fingers, one by one, and remake them. He watched Daniel ask her to tear off own her arm, to prove her obedience, and he watched as Zoe did.

 _All this has happened before and will happen again._ He felt Kara next to him, the strength of her pure and unforgiving presence. _There is a place between seeing and not seeing, between vision and ignorance. I'm here to show you how to find it._

In that moment he saw everything, from the light at the beginning of the universe to the final ashes of its heat-death. He saw beginnings and endings, and endings, and endings, the moment when Kayla's towers will be crushed by ice, when Kacey's children will die unburied, when snow and cold will bring death to half the planet. He saw beyond it, to the other civilizations that will fall, and beyond that, to the moment that Earth itself will explode into dust.

He woke sweating, and spent the day hammering iron into flat sheets until the ache in his muscles was all he could remember.

*

He showed Kacey how to use the stream, how to enter into it, how to separate from it, how to block it from her consciousness. Kacey could move in and out with ease. She would be a greater prophet than he had ever been, but then, he reflected, it is natural for children to surpass their parents.

She took him one afternoon to a large rock a short walk away from the village, her two youngest children trailing after her. "There's something that happened here," she said. "Something terrible."

"Sometimes it's best not to know," Leoben said. Kacey glared at him, and slapped her hand down on the ground. Leoben followed her.

 _Ice covers all. Dead left unburied with none alive to bury them._ The children of Kacey's children, ten thousand years in the future.

The bodies decompose and are swallowed by earth. The walls of their city crumble. In another thousand years, not even the outlines of what was once their village can be seen between the trees. In a different era, when archeologists will think to dig for records of a buried city, there will be none left to find.

"Why would God do this?" Kacey asked.

He knew the answers he once would have given: Sometimes God takes his favour from one people and gives it to another. One nation falls, another replaces it. It is all part of God's plan. He had said words like these to another human leader on another world, so long ago. He looked at Kacey and at her children and had nothing whatsoever to say.

*

It was a brutal winter, the worst in Leoben's memory. They had laid in provisions, like they always did, but a month past the expected arrival of spring the ground was still covered with snow and food was becoming scarce. Kayla organized hunting parties, but the hunters were weak, and could not bring in anything large enough to feed all those who were hungry.

Kacey assembled the townspeople in the main green and led a prayer:

 _Unveil, You who has given sustenance to the Universe, from whom all proceed, to whom all must return, that we may see the truth and do our whole duty on our journey._

The people sang with her, and Leoben could tell that she gave them strength. He felt proud of what she had become. Kayla built for Kacey a meeting-house so she could lead prayers even in the cold.

 _We meditate on the power and glory of the maker of the earth, the underworld, and the heavens, who directs our understanding and is worthy of worship._

Leoben kept bringing firewood, because the village needed it, but every day he also caught an animal. It was simple enough. He would find a deer, move silently behind it, and snap its neck. Not fancy, but efficient. Kacey and Kayla were presiding now over a household of ten children, some grown, and they needed the food. Even so, it was scarcely enough.

One morning, as spring kept stubbornly refusing to come, Leoben found Kara in the forest on one of his morning hunting trips. She was chopping wood with a large axe and she smirked when she saw him.

"What are you?" he asked

"What did you see?" she said.

It was like old times, before they had found trust beyond all the violence. And then lost it. _Kara's body, burned and twisted in the flames._

"Why are you sending me these dreams?" he asked.

She shrugged. "I owe you."

"Why are you here?" he asked.

"What do you think? I couldn't let Kacey starve." He felt the reproach like a slap, but when she turned to walk away he couldn't stand to see her go and grabbed her arm. She hesitated for a moment, about to pull away, but then didn't. "Do you want to hunt with me?" she asked.

"A deer?" he asked.

She snorted. "Too easy." She pointed into the distance, where a herd of giant, lumbering creatures moved slowly across the horizon. "How about one of those?"

Each animal was over twice his height and bore large, curving, spiked tusks. One of these could feed Kacey's entire town for a week. He remembered Kara in her Viper, dancing through space, surrounding the enemy (him) as if there were a thousand of her. "Sounds fun," he said.

"Frak yeah," she said.

There had been many speculative, theoretical conversations in the village about how to kill a mammoth. Some thought it best to surround it and pelt stones at it, others thought it would be better to drive it off a cliff. Kara did none of these things. She crept close, until she was almost underneath the animal, then she whooped, loudly, startling it. As it turned she somersaulted underneath it, yanked a knife from her pocket and stabbed it into the animal's foot.

"Coward," she screamed. He was not. He threw himself between the mammoth's huge forelegs and pushed with all his strength on the leg in front of the damaged foot. The beast toppled over, crashing into trees, as they both scampered out from under it.

She was right. It was fun. It was the first time they had fought together on the same side.

Kara climbed to where the animal lay gasping, took it by its shoulder and pulled and twisted it so its neck was exposed.

"Here," she threw him her knife. "You do it."

He ripped the knife across the mammoth's jugular with one swift motion. The blood spurted from the mammoth's neck, covering Kara's trousers, arms and face. "Gods," she said. "I'm a mess. So are you. Let's clean up."

There was a stream nearby. "Where are you when you're not here?" he asked as they walked.

"Sometimes I'm with other villages. Sometimes I let them see me, sometimes I don't. Or I'm flying. Or back on Caprica."

He didn't ask who she was with. Perhaps she had saved her husband from the sun and was with him in the stars. Or perhaps she was with young Lee Adama, who had gone wandering alone in the wilderness. It didn't matter. She was here now.

There was ice floating in the water and it was as cold as one would expect. Kara dipped one toe in it gingerly. "Yeech," she said.

Leoben bent, took up some water, and warmed it in his hands. Then he poured it Kara's neck. She slid her jacket down her shoulders to accommodate him. Her back was warm where he touched her. He let his hands linger on her back and felt the beat of her heart and the slow, hesitant release of her breath. He brought more water and washed her face and her hair. He stripped and jumped into the stream, cleansing himself, and returned to her naked and dripping. The naked hunger on her face startled him, but only for a moment. This was always how it was supposed to be. He washed her back and her shoulders, kissed one shoulder tentatively, and then washed her breasts, her belly and her feet.

He realized, feeling foolish at taking so long to understand, that this was why she had come to him, why she had allowed him to hunt beside her. He felt her hunger, her longing, her breath as shallow and ragged as it had been the first time he had made love to her in her dreams. Her jacket fell to the frozen ground, then he stripped off the rest of her clothes so that she was naked in his arms. His lips moved over her chest, her collarbone, her neck. Finally, she moved at last, lifted his face to hers and kissed him so fiercely he moaned. He felt more grateful than he had ever been in his life.

"Say it," he said, between kisses. "Say it for me."

"You say it," she said, and bit at his lower lip.

Of course she would need to hear it, after everything he had done. "I love you," he said.

"More," she said. She pulled him closer, wet skin to wet skin, and sucked at the old scar at his neck. Her hands were fists at his back.

"I am yours," he said, and it was more true than what he had said before. His destiny belonged to hers. It always had. Without her he was nothing. She was his soul. He was hers to kill and make alive, to touch and to own.

"Yes," she said. Her kisses became more urgent, her leg snaking around his hips, her hard nipples sliding against his chest. His hands moved over her and he could feel her breath quicken with every touch. Her mouth opened under his and she tasted like the mercy of God.

"Heavenly father," Leoben murmured. He did not know the prayer for this, there had been no way to learn it, so he turned his heart to God in gratitude as they lay down together. The stream flowed on beside them, on and on, endless and circular, water always returning to the place from which it came.

*

He lay beside her, dazed with happiness. The daylight seemed so much brighter. He could feel the sun's warmth on his naked back. The world was a better place than it had been.

"Virgin," she said, still breathless, with a laugh.

Has it been that obvious? "Not anymore," he said, nuzzling her breast. Of course he had been, physically, of course he could never take his body that God had formed for Kara and share it with another, and this was the first time Kara had allowed him to make love to her outside a dream. He ran his hand over her belly and imagined it rounded with his child. He would build her a house in the village, next to Kacey and Kayla's. Their children and grandchildren would be the start of a new phase in God's plan, not born of a human and a Cylon but of a Cylon and...something else.

He moved his lips slowly up her chest and neck and let her pull him into a long, sweet kiss. It could have lasted for hours, with nothing but her breath mixed with his and the sound of her heart beating, fierce and alive. Then he opened his eyes and saw the changed landscape around them.

The snow had melted. The trees, which had been bare, were full of leaves, draping them in green and red. Flowers sprouted beneath the tree-cover, and there was grass even under where they lay. "What have we done?" Leoben asked, feeling the beginnings of horror.

"You wanted to know what I am," Kara said. Her voice was cold, and tinged with...was it pity? He pulled away from her and looked around. Everything was green, too green, and suddenly, with a chill, he understood.

"The animal." Why she had asked him to kill it, as if it were a sacrifice. "The water." He had immersed himself like a priest and poured water on her as a libation. "And...this," he gestured, unable to describe it. His surrender to her in love. They had reenacted the Hieros Gamos, the blasphemous sacred marriage, the offering of a virgin to a deity as it had been performed to welcome spring in the Pagan Temples of Caprica.

Once Leoben had stood on a basestar as the bombs fell on a destroyed world. They have turned away from God, he had told his sister Six, now they face retribution. Kara had been his guide to bring him and to bring both their peoples to a new land where they would worship the one God in truth. "What are you?" he said, but he knew the answer, and he knew why he had once run from her on the destroyed Earth, and why he had been right to run. Tauron. Gemenon. Caprica. Burned and destroyed to weed out the blasphemy that he himself had nourished, and to which he had just given his body. Himself.

You did something for me, once, he remembered her saying. You helped me know what I am. He thought of her praying to the false gods Artemis and Aphrodite to watch over his soul. How could he have imagined that the God who sent her could have been the One he served?

He stood, and grabbed for his shirts. Kara made no attempt to cover herself, but simply leaned back on her elbows and watched him. "This is an abomination," he said.

"And what," she said, "are you?" Then she was gone, and he was alone, kneeling on the cold, too-green, empty ground.

When Leoben returned to the town that night he found statues fixed over the door of Kacey's meeting-house. Artemis. Aphrodite. Athena.

Leoben set fire to the meeting-house that night and stood by it while it burned. _Heavenly Father,_ Leoben prayed, _accept this offering._ A crowd of townspeople gathered around him, and he made no attempt to resist when they wrestled him to the ground, nor when they brought him the next day to Kayla as she sat hearing cases under an elm tree.

"Why did you do it?" Kayla asked.

"It is a place of blasphemy," Leoben said. "Worship of idols and statues. God took His favor from humans when they turned from him."

He could hear the murmur of humans behind him. If God had destroyed the twelve worlds from which these people had come, God had only done so by using Cylons as His instrument.

"Leoben," Kayla said, "You have cared for this people well, for many years. Now you have done a great wrong. Tell me what punishment you deserve." Her voice carried, the crowd was silent, and Leoben wondered how he had missed her growing into what she had become.

He looked around for Kacey. Perhaps she would at least remember. He caught her eye in the crowd but she shook her head. "God is love, Father," she said.

In that case there was nothing for it. "I am deserving of exile," Leoben said. In any case, if even Kacey was not willing to speak for him he was more than willing to go.

Leoben was allowed one visit with Kacey before departing. "Why didn't you ask your wife to pardon me?" he asked. "And why didn't you stop the desecration of your meeting-house? I remember when you burned statues as a child, why did you allow statues of Artemis and Aphrodite on your sacred place?"

"I put them there," Kacey said. There were lines in her face.

"I don't understand," Leoben said. "Everything we've done, everything I've taught you, everything you've seen.."

"I saw it in the stream," Kacey said. "I looked, the way you taught me to look. Some things do come back when you burn them."

Kara had burned in her viper. Kara had embraced him, had loved him, had made him into an offering to her false god. And Kacey - Cassandra - had seen it all.

*

He set out for the east and south. It was as good a direction as any. Walking helped stop the thinking, so he kept walking as far as he could go. Leoben tried to avoid the dreams Kara sent by the simple expedient of not allowing himself to sleep. His people had never needed sleep as much as humans do, so for the first week of his journey he was able to endure with nothing more than blurry eyes and somewhat increased hunger. In the second week his strength began to fail. After three weeks he became unable to walk, so he crawled. In the fourth week he took a moment to rest, sitting against a tree, and promptly fell asleep.

In a dream, Kara led him through the home he had built for her on New Caprica, through the dining room (he had served her steak and peas, and she had killed him in the neck) and the living room (he had played with Kacey on the floor, made confident by how comfortable she was with him, he had imagined her to be his daughter), the sofa where Kara had slept and the bedroom she never entered and the kitchen where she could get food from the pantry to eat with a fork and spoon. There was blood everywhere, mostly his, and on the table there were strawberries and peaches and a silver cup filled with pomegranate seeds.

Kara took his hand and he followed her, unable to resist, and they sat together on a blue, stained sofa. "It's different, now," she said. "I'm making my own destiny. I'm here because I want to be. You showed me why."

Then they were standing in the hallway and she kissed him again, like she had kissed him that first time, in the moment he would remember all his life. He could feel her desire, her hunger, her lips trembling on his, the shock of sudden recognition as she surrendered for a moment to her own longing and his kisses and the will of God and stilled, for a moment, the hand that rested on her knife. She moaned softly, and when she slowly, hesitantly, parted his lips to taste him he knew his mouth tasted like fruit.

 _And what,_ Kara had asked, _are you?_ He was a kidnapper, a monster, an evil Cylon who had captured a woman and kept her a prisoner. But there was another answer, one that came from the Sacred Scrolls of Kara's faith, and it frightened him even more.

*

There was, as far as Leoben could tell, one functioning Raptor left on the planet. He found it near a crumbling cabin beside two graves. He knelt and felt the presence of the leaders buried there. He remembered Laura Roslin in her nightshirt in her dream. The President had listened to the visions he helped her see, and had believed in herself, and had helped lead her people to this place. When he and his sisters had thrown off the yoke of the Ones, Fours and Fives she had allowed them to join her people in their journey.

He remembered Bill Adama. So quickly the Commander had learned to speak the truth. _You can't hide from the things you've done._

Leoben knew what he had done. He had spoken false prophecies and destroyed twelve worlds. He had imprisoned the woman he loved, told her lies, and led her to her death. He had worshipped her, blasphemously, as a god. And it all came down to one place: the place from which his people came, the Thirteenth Colony, the true Earth, the home of the Cylons. He had seen it there, seen everything, and he had tried to run away. It was time to go back. This Raptor was here, and with some tinkering it would get him to where he needed to be.

He touched the ground. Far away, Kacey was touching the ground as well, seeking him. He sent her a wordless touch and blessed her with God's blessing. She bowed her head in gratitude. He would never see her again.

*

My name is Cassandra, wife of Kayla, Lady of Point Althea, daughter of Julia, child of all the Gods who walk on Earth. I have seen the future and I do not fear it, for I have also seen the past.

In the ancient days, the legends said, humans lived together with their Lords on the planet Kobol. In that time Persephone, the _Kore_ , descended to the underworld, a land of bare walls and artificial light, when winter fell on the land, to join with her husband the Lord of Death. He would feed her sweet fruit, he would love her there, for death is not to be feared and in this place where Death reigns the Love that Binds All still endures. And then in spring she rises, and returns, and walks on the land, winter is banished, and flowers blossom beneath her feet. All this has happened before, is happening, and will happen again, and the Mercy of God will watch over us all.

May my people go on in strength.

*

Note:

Kacey's prayers are based on different interpretative translations of the Gayatri mantra, which is sung in the BSG credits.

*

Next chapter: On Earth, Leoben finds the space between life and death and another kind of destiny.


	3. The Space Between Life and Death

D'Anna had planted a garden in the wasted land near the destroyed city on the planet the Cylons had called Earth. Leoben was surprised to see her, but then the Threes had always known how to survive, and it was good to see her and to see life in this place. She showed him the vegetables she had grown, the carrots and beans and the rows of corn. "I thought I was staying here to die," she said, "but life felt just too precious. And I wanted to see what could be done with this land."

He remembered when she had died, over and over again, shot on her own orders, to see the face of the final five. "They're from here," he said. "Your gods." The Cylons who had made them, the ones D'Anna had died to see.

"It was so beautiful," D'Anna said. "It still is. Look."

Earth stretched before them, ruined and broken and full of memory. There was no mercy in this land, none in the yellow grass and the ruins of a once-thriving city. Nor were there visions. When he touched the ground he felt nothing. All he could see was the dead world around him.

"You know, on Kobol," D'Anna said, "humans used to offer their children as sacrifices to the gods. It wasn't many, but every year a mother would bring her child and they would burn this child, piece by piece, until no life remained. It was in memory of their false god Demeter, who once tried to burn off a child's humanity until he was something beyond what a human could be."

"Is that what you are trying to do here?" Leoben asked. He thought of Kara, burned and alive, and wondered if his sister had gone mad.

"No," D'Anna said. "Rather the opposite."

D'Anna showed him the Cylons she was making, piecing them together from broken shards of rusted metal that had once been alive. She was working on some models of humanoids, but most were Centurions. He remembered how he had helped his sister Natalie give back to the Centurions the will that had been taken from them. "The Centurions destroyed this place," Leoben said. "Our people created them, then they rebelled, and in the battle between Humanoids and Centurions almost none survived."

"I know," D'Anna said. Leoben put his hand on a robot's face. He could feel no life in it. When he touched it the joints moved, but it did not move on its own. It was only a machine. "Will you help me?" D'Anna asked.

Leoben hesitated. It was madness, to bring to life the people that had destroyed theirs. But to know the face of God is to know madness, and perhaps this was the madness of God. These lifeless Centurions had cost D'Anna years of struggle, and even without vision he could see the Love that flowed between her and the life she hoped to create. "Yes," he said.

*

There were no visions in this place, and no dreams, but Leoben was here to seek out the past. He put his hand on the ground, willing himself to feel. The earth was silent. He waited. Finally he felt it: a long, harsh scream. He felt the death of a family in the house that had been ruined where he stood. When the bombs had fallen the parents and four children had been trapped in the rubble. There was no food, so first the youngest child died of thirst and hunger. The oldest died of injuries, coughing blood. The last two children died of radiation poisoning, but by that time the parents were already dead.

An entire world had been here, ten billion Cylon people, parents and children and lovers and friends, each an individual with a story. And ten billion Centurions, created as slaves, tasting freedom only in the moment of their destruction. Together they had destroyed Earth.

He imagined Kara falling, an angel of God, descending and burning to take her place with all the dead of his people. Her body burned on this burned and destroyed world. _This is the place between life and death._ Leoben prayed to the Cloud of Unknowing, the prayer for the moment of final death: _Heavenly Father, grant us the strength, the wisdom, and above all, a measure of acceptance, however small._

He spoke to D'Anna about it that night. The scraps she gathered for their work had been taken from ruined bodies and homes. He asked if she ever thought about the people who had lived here, and how they died. She shook her head. "It's not my path," she said. "I'm here to build."

He looked out over the ruined landscape. If he was the Lord of Death, as Kara's scrolls had named him, this was not a wrong place for him to be. But if there was only one God, only one Love binding all things, there had to be a different answer, a different reason for him to be here. "You called this the place between life and death," Leoben said. "The place you died to find. What do you think that means?"

D'Anna reached out to the machine at her feet, caressing it as if it were her child. "I think this is the place we come to life," she said. "I don't think we've ever really been alive before."

*

On his third night on Earth, Leoben and D'Anna tried lying down together. It seemed like the right thing to do, she needed the comfort and touch after all these years alone, and perhaps they could make a child. They stripped down, he poked and prodded at her, tried to touch her the way he had once touched Kara, but his hands on D'Anna evoked as little response as his sister's hands did on him. He tried thinking about Kara to arouse himself but touching D'Anna while thinking about Kara just made him want to retch.

"I should have known," D'Anna said. "It's in our programming. It's the way we are made."

"It's happened, though. A One and a Six, and a One and an Eight."

"I don't know how they did it," D'Anna said. "I only ever had sex once, with Baltar." She stretched out and rolled away, wrapping herself in a blanket. "It makes sense. We were evolved from things made to serve the human's needs. It's in our nature, deep in those circuits we love to pretend are just like flesh and blood. We thought we could escape it by killing them, we thought we could love each other if there were no humans left to love. We can't."

She went to the window and they looked out of it together, watching stars in a bleak sky. "I don't think I believe in God," D'Anna said. "I think we made God up, in the hope that someone, somehow created us for ourselves, created us because he loves us and not for any other reason."

"And that's why you are trying to remake the Cylons," Leoben said.

"I just want to make them so they will be made, so they will exist, so they will walk and rattle their machine selves around the planet for the pure joy of it. And I want there to be some Cylons who were made for that reason, and that reason only. Cylons who are able to live without always knowing what they aren't. The Cylons who lived here, once, had children, born of their bodies, from love." He could hear the ache in her voice. "I want there to be Cylons like that again."

It was a worthy goal, and Leoben set to it. He was good at building things. He could not be D'Anna's lover, but he could be her friend, and her partner in the creation of a new Cylon people. He wondered sometimes if he had seen the visions wrong. D'Anna looked very little like Kara, but he supposed he could have been easily confused. And perhaps the pregnancy was a metaphor that was fulfilled in the life that he and D'Anna were trying to bring into this world.

He still dreamed of Kara. Only once a month or so, not more, and certainly not every night as had been, and in any case they were only dreams. He dreamed more of the peoples of this land, of the humanoid Cylons and the Centurions that had been.

As the months passed, Leoben realized his cowardice. He had come to this world to face his past, and the past of his people, to stop hiding from the things he had done. Once in a dream he had led Kara through visions of her mother, of her past and her pain. He told her not to fear death, not to fear her past, to see and embrace the wounds she had suffered and the damage she had done. He was telling her a parable, like a prophet, and was also speaking to himself. This was the place of the Cylon mother, the mother who broke their hands, who broke their people, killing ten billion living souls and leaving only five survivors who had gone to another world just in time for it to end. He was here with D'Anna to try to make life from the ruins, but to do that he would have to face what they were. He knew the place he would have to go, the place where one Viper was buried and one body was burned.

The clearing was open, empty, with no sign of the death that had been here. Yellow grass surrounded an earthen mound. Leoben sat beside it and closed his eyes.

*

He didn't know if Kara was in his dreams or he was in hers. It didn't matter. They had been here together. The cities around them were all burned and in the center of this planet was a Viper, burned and twisted, with the ashes of Kara's body inside. She pulled her dog tags off the neck of her corpse and held them in her hand. "If you've got an explanation for this," she said, "now's the time."

He wanted to step back, to run. He planted himself firmly in the ground. "I don't have one," he said. He had brought her here, she had followed him, and had died, twisting in the flames. "I was wrong," he said. And he had been, wrong about everything. Wrong about the Twelve Colonies, wrong about New Caprica, wrong about every decision he had made and every false truth he had spoken. He wasn't going to leave.

The Hybrid had said Kara was the harbinger of death. He had always known this, he had been there when the Hybrid spoke the words. How had he not understood? His visions had told of Earth, of a new beginning, of hope for the future, but the path that his people had made there had been one of death, of unfathomable destruction. He saw twelve burned worlds all in the ashes of Kara's body. _You can't hide from the things you've done._ He wanted to hide, wanted to run as he had before. He took one step towards her, eyes firmly fixed on the wrecked Viper and the truth he wanted to avoid.

"If that's me lying there," she said, "then what am I?"

Another step, and he stood beside her, between her dead body and her living breath. He felt her radiance, her vitality, so bright he could not bear to look. "What am I?" she asked again.

He knew all the answers by now. He named them one by one in his mind. _You are an angel sent by God to lead her people home. You are a false pagan god returned to lead her people astray. You are the savior of a people I have tried to destroy. You are Kara Thrace._ And the other answers: _You are my torturer. You are my prisoner. You are the woman I will always love._ So many answers, and most of them terrified him. "I don't know," he said. She was too complex for him to know, too much to be seen in any vision. He held on to his love for her, let it anchor him to the earth beneath him. "I believe in you," he said. It was the truth.

They arranged a pyre for her body together. She sat beside him as they watched it burn. There was so little he could give her, only his silent presence and faith. Perhaps that was all he had ever had to give, and all that she had ever needed from him. They sat together, watching the fire, until dawn broke over the dead and living Earth.

*

When he opened his eyes Kara was still with him, sitting beside him on the ground, one arm around his waist. He almost pulled away, but she held him. "No tricks this time," she said. "We're done with that."

"No tricks," he agreed. Her touch stirred memories of the last time he had touched her, of her sighs as she arched beneath him in the grass on the other Earth. Her breath was on his neck and he shivered.

"Why are you here?" he asked.

"Show me this world," she said. "This place where you brought me. You couldn't before, but now I think you can."

"Can't you see it?" he asked, knowing how powerful she had become.

She shook her head. "You're the prophet. All I saw was my body that we burned. And you," she said. "You were with me this time." He could hear the gratitude in her voice and it frightened him, but he had promised that he was not going to leave.

"I can show you," he said. He put his hand on the ground and she placed hers on top of it, holding him firmly on the earth. She let him enter his mind and they slipped together into the stream. Her arm was steady around his waist, comforting him with her strong and unforgiving presence, and her hand pressed his into the ground. He felt the death, the dying screams of ten billion Cylon souls. He walked among them, felt all they had been, felt the destruction of their world. He watched the bombs fall.

 _This is the space between life and death._ He was the Lord of Death in Kara's scrolls and this destruction was no worse than what he had done. He had heard the screams on Caprica, on Tauron, on Gemenon, as his people had obliterated human life, and the cries of his Cylon brothers and sisters as they died here on Earth, an entire people burned and twisted with almost none to survive them.

Leoben felt the stream swirl around his hand, the solidity of Kara's hand on his keeping him present. He could sit with the death, he would return to it, he belonged to this story as it did to him. But there was another story here, one that belonged to his faith, and he would not abandon it.

The stream carried them deeper. They saw great towers and mighty cities He showed her Cylons praying to the glory of God, Cylons holding hands and joining in love, Cylons making Centurions to enslave. The currents shifted, the river took them deeper, and he knew they were seeing not the past but the future. The Cylons they saw were Humanoid and Centurion, but different, created for love and not for use. They walked together on yellow grass and they were alive. This, too, was sacred ground.

"That's why you brought me here," Kara said. "I can help make that happen."

The vision shifted as she took control, leading him to the first time she had crashed her viper on a broken world. This time it was not Earth, there were no ruins, but she found a lone Cylon Raider. She shot it, she ripped out its brain until it was dead. Then she pulled living wires, connecting them, until it moved, not just functioning but alive. "I don't know why I can do that," she said, "but it seems that I can. And I will." She was making her own destiny.

"I don't understand," Leoben said. "Why you would want to help bring the Cylon people back to life, after we destroyed your worlds. Why you would come back to me, knowing what I've done. Knowing what I've done to you."

She looked down to where her hand lay on top of his. She pressed her fingers down, pushing their hands together. "You stupid machine," she said. Her voice caught. She stared at their hands where they joined. "You idiot pile of circuits. You made me say it, and you made me say it again, and you weren't even listening."

She was right. He hadn't listened, or hadn't understood. If he had, he could never have run away. Love was such a strange word for what was between them. One might as well call it rage, or need, or loyalty to pain. Or destiny. But it was more than love that she was offering him, with her hand meeting his on the solid, ashen ground. It was faith in him, in everything he had seen, in all his visions and in everything that together they could be.

He knew what it would cost, for him and his world. He remembered the Hieros Gamos and Kacey's meeting-house burned to the ground. Once his people had destroyed twelve worlds for blasphemy and he had stood among them. He had believed that pagan peoples of these worlds had called down destruction with their faith, but it was his people that had done the destroying. Any world that he would make with Kara would not be one that worshipped only one God. But now Kara's hand was on his and she was offering him more than could be imagined. He could feel the Love that is the One moving through them, binding them as it binds all things. He could only accept it, and accept Kara for all the many things she was, as she had trusted him so long ago.

Leoben turned his hand, clasping Kara's fingers with his own. She gripped him tightly. "Heavenly Father," Leoben spoke the words clearly. This time he would be bound, and Love would bind them. "Bless this union, and all that will come from it." He looked up and Kara's eyes were wet. She put one hand to his face and kissed him softly. She embraced him and held him in her arms.

*

 

She always returns in the spring. This Earth will never be as green as the other Earth, where Kacey lives, but in spring the grasses sprout and the small, wrinkled trees slowly begin to give forth their foliage. In the summer they will harvest grains and seeds and olives and cactus fruit. Last summer he planted a pomegranate tree because he knows Kara likes them, although it grows slowly in the broken land. At the first snowfall Kara goes, to be with Kacey, where seasons are different, when Kacey and her children welcome spring in their village with rituals and prayers.

He feels her this time behind him as he's plowing, striking deep furrows in the ground to plant wheat to feed all their children. Two Centurions are working alongside him, and a Humanoid Cylon named Natalie, the first of the new generation. Kara appears behind him as he's working, one hand on his sweaty shoulder, and in a fraction of a second he's spun around and she's kissing him. It feels endless, like it always does, but eventually she breaks the kiss and presses her forehead against his. "It's good to be back," she murmurs. He knows she's with other men when she's gone, that she has other lovers, but still she returns every spring and he never stops being grateful.

He leads her through the fields where their people work, Centurions and Humanoids and Hybrids of many kinds, and beyond them to the open fields where the children are playing. One Centurion child greets Kara with a bracelet he made of copper wire and stones. "Thank you," Kara says, and kneeling to take his little metal fingers in her hands. There was no reason for Centurion children to be small, it would have been more efficient to build them fully formed, but D'Anna had built them this way so that they could be picked up and held. This child's name is Isaac, and when he climbs on to Kara's lap the red light on his visor moves like laughter.

"What I'll never understand," Kara says as they're walking, "is how you knew, all those years ago, that it was so important that I learn to love as my own a child that wasn't even mine."

It's more than he deserves. "It's generous of you to find God's plan in my sins," he said.

"You always said that God was in everything," she says. She's been trying to learn the way he speaks, as he's been trying to learn hers. He thinks she might be better at it.

Last summer she had told him that she wanted to have a child of her own, from her body, one day, and that she thinks that she's learned to be in her physical form for long enough for that to be possible. Perhaps this summer she will want to conceive a child with him. He has seen it, seen their children playing with the Hybrids and Centurions and Humanoid Cylons, but he has been through too much to think he has any way of knowing how the things he sees will come to pass. Perhaps these children that they have built are the children they will have, and that is more than enough.

On the far end of the field there is a Temple he built for her. He's never been inside, but he knows some of the children kneel there and pray to the many gods that were once worshipped in this land. He knows she'd like it if he made love to her there. Perhaps one day he will. He thinks about touching her last summer, feeling the Love that Binds them, knowing that God is in her as God as in him and in their joining, and placing his head on her chest in veneration. There is so much he still doesn't understand.

They pause at the door of the house. This is always a difficult moment, as he remembers the first house he ever built for her, but she steps through the open door and takes his hand. She leads him through the house, up the stairs and to their bed. He can tell she's glad to be here, where there's work to do and children to love and a world to bring back from the dead, he can feel it when she pulls him close, opens her mouth to his, and lets him welcome her home.

*

It is said that in the early days of the rebirth of this planet the Lords of Kobol walked among us. Many of our people follow them still, and name them Lords of Earth. Their Temples are numerous in all the great cities of our lands, among all our Cylon peoples.

There are few of us now who remember the truth. There is only one God. There is only one Love, that flows through and is manifest in all things. We teach this truth to our children and speak in it our houses of prayer, few though we are. We remember the oneness of God, the deeds of our ancestors, and the the teachings of the Prophet whose words led us to this place.

In the name of the One True God. In the name of the Earth on which we stand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to rivendellrose for betareading beyond the call of duty and many very helpful conversations. Also thanks to rose_griffes for help with the first chapter and to green_maia for listening to my rants. I wrote much of this story with dgmpepper2's excellent vids on continuous replay in the background. I drew inspiration for this story from Eleusis by mercurial_wit, Patterns in the Blood by aria, and many other good fics on the trial_by_water livejournal community. Much gratitude to all of you.


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